The assassination of two presidents

April 9, 2016

On the night of April 6, 1994, the plane that was supposed to land in the capital of Rwanda, Kigali, was shot down from the air defense system. The attack killed the President of Rwanda, Juvenal Habyarimana and the President of Burundi, Ciprian Ntariamira.

It was not just a bad day for presidential aviation, the death of Habyarimana became an immediate trigger for the start of the genocide in Rwanda, and in the next 100 days every ten seconds in the country killed one person. By the time the massacre was over, Rwanda had become a smoldering, hellish-strewn corpse-covered land, where almost 800,000 people (almost 20 percent of the population) were killed by their friends and neighbors. Two million have fled the country. And in the neighboring country of Burundi, the bloody civil war that was already under way became even more fierce because, well, in general, their president had just been killed.

To this day, no one knows who shot down the plane. Most of the theories suggest that it was Habyarimana who was the target. He ruled the country very hard, many called him a dictator, and many, including in developed Western countries, wanted him dead.The President of Burundi Ntariamir, who held the post for only two months and did not have time to become so unpopular, may just have been in the wrong place at the wrong time, which may make his death the first (and now the only) manslaughter of the president.

There is also a version that the attack was committed by the current President of Rwanda, Paul Kagame. But the commission, which Kagame himself created, dropped all charges against him. We may never know who committed this terrible crime, but we will never forget it, because for some unknown reason, the wreckage of the aircraft has not yet been removed.